What’s this? Why, is it an irreverant indie point’n’click game in the style of old scumm engine titles? It is! Hooray!

If you like, you can watch the Kaptain Brawe: A Brawe New World trailer below. If you like that, then you can get the demo here. If you like the trailer and the demo, then you can buy the full game from Gamersgate for the price of $20. Would you like that? I think it’s likely.
It’s a looker, this one. And works on Macs, too! Excellent.

I was a leeeeetle dubious to see “That doesn’t work” portrayed as a fuzzy nostalgic feature rather than an irksome, irritating compromise brought about by limited memory and writing time…but the rest of the trailer got me interested in the demo.

Not really impressed… I always liked SIERRA adventures (and its clones like Al Emmo) more, anyway.
What I don’t like here:
No voice acting, not enough “try and laugh” (you would’ve thought pointing a gun at a planet would trigger something funny…but no), the solutions are “little bit” too easy to guess and rather tedious, music is..well…pretty boring and the demo is generally too short to really get a better picture..

Really? Dang. You’d think after all that effort on lush, painted graphics, they’d also be pouring love into the “devteam thinks of everything” angle. And while no VO is better than terrible VO, that’s still not good. Sigh. I guess competent VAs are expensive for the kind of budget you can get for a straight-up adventure these days. Also, this spam filter is terrible.

Just to bring everyone down and point out where the pun headline comes from (and it’s not The Dead Poets Society):

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Ye Olde ‘That Doesn’t Work’ just doesn’t fly these days. Last indie adventure I played through was Time Gentlemen, Please, which was notable for having a unique response to almost almost every single wrong action, often working as a subtle hint to push you in the direction of the right one.

If you can’t afford voice acting, then at least some extra effort into the text so that you don’t end up with the modern equivalent of a confused Infocom parser.

Attempting to repost this, as it says my last attempt was eaten by the anti-spam filter:

Ye Olde ‘That Doesn’t Work’ just doesn’t fly these days. Last indie adventure I played through was Time Gentlemen, Please, which was notable for having a unique response to almost almost every single wrong action, often working as a subtle hint to push you in the direction of the right one.

If you can’t afford voice acting, then at least some extra effort into the text so that you don’t end up with the modern equivalent of a confused Infocom parser.

Brawe looks like he’s in a customised Vault suit. Now you won’t be able to unsee it, you also won’t be able to unsee that he was from the Seamen Vault.

Anyway, I really don’t understand the myth that surrounds good voice acting actually requiring huge amounts of money, it simply isn’t true. Look at, for example, The Lost Spires for Oblivion, it’s especially impressive because the Argonian sounds better than the stock Oblivion Argonians, by a truly massive margin.

Another great example is the Clan Quest Mod; of which here’s a sample. Look up the other videos of it, too. It’s as good as the voice-acting of a lot of AAA games, not movie-quality, but in the gaming industry… what is? It’s still bloody good though, which shows that the talent is there.

The thing is, shit voice-acting doesn’t happen because of a lack of money, but rather because of a lack of time, or a lack of the inclination to care. If I were to get involved with an indie development team, and I needed voice acting, the first thing I’d do is actually poke some of the people who’ve done the best voice-acting for mods to see whether they’d be interested in a job.

Finally: Telltale.

Telltale is indie, they started out with just some very average Bone games (which I enjoyed nonetheless) and since then they produced Tales of Monkey Island, which is frankly one of the best adventure games I’ve ever played, and definitely the best Monkey Island game, period. (So controversial, I know, but it’s how I feel. I ask you to deal with it.) They managed to get some pretty decent voice acting in their games, Winslow is a great example of this, they matched Sam & Max up decently whilst not being able to find/afford the original voice actors, and so on, and so on.

Really, if they wanted decent voice acting, there are a number of ways they could get it in there without breaking the bank, there are a number of amateur voice actors out there who’d likely appreciate the job, after all. You don’t have to hit up a bunch of disinterested ‘professionals’ which would doubtlessly result in shit, listless voice-acting, when there are amateur enthusiasts out there who’re really, really good at what they do.